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Redesigning TouringPlans.com

A really fun project for some great people.

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The Story of Maingate Ads

One of the first projects I devoted time to after leaving Disney, almost a year ago, was to finally finish and release my Magic In Type – Castle letterpress poster. It was a project I had started many months earlier, but I could never devote enough time to get it to the finish line. I was very excited to finally be able to work during real daytime hours and make it happen.

Skip forward a few weeks to when I had a crate full of freshly pressed prints on the floor of my studio, and it was time to let the world know about it. I, of course, had this dream that I would post one tweet about my posters and the world would be completely amazed by what I had done. Word would spread like wildfire and I would sell out in mere minutes. I did tweet about it, and posted on facebook, and I had a reasonably good response to that… but reality was setting in that I would need to dig a little deeper to make it work.

I decided I would do a little online advertising in the niche areas that might be interested. Disney fans & typography geeks don’t really run in the same circles, so I focused on the area I was most familiar… Disney Parks fan sites.

To make a long story just the tiniest bit longer, I found that advertising on the sites I frequented most was a complete mess. There is a myriad of sites that were possibilities, but they were all covered with boring, vaguely-targeted text ads or flashy, noisy, annoying animation ads, and in most cases, both. It all felt like somebody was handing out a box full of megaphones and telling everyone to stand in the same room and yell their message. With everybody trying to scream the loudest, everyone gets lost in the noise.

It was around this same time I read an interview with a business hero of mine named Jim Coudal. In the interview Jim talks about being frustrated with the state of online advertising in a specific demographic where he wanted to market a new product. He got annoyed and did what any self respecting entrepreneur would do. He decided he could do it better, and with that he launched The Deck.

His story just hit home with me at the right time. I started forming plans to fix what I think is broken about advertising on the sites I love.

After several months of planning and working out the technical details, I’m very happy to announce the launch of the latest J. Blackbird venture…

Maingate Ads – A new ad network reaching out to theme park fans, travelers, memorabilia hounds and amusement industry buffs.

Beginning July 1, 2010 we’ll be serving simple, beautiful and perfectly targeted ads on an impressive lineup of websites. We’ve been so fortunate that our message has struck a chord with website publishers and advertisers alike. We’ll start reasonably small, but we’ve already got some big plans for the road ahead.

If you run or know of a website that’s interested in carrying Maingate Ads, or if you’d like to find out about purchasing ad space, drop us a line.

Free letterpress poster

** Update *****************
The winning tweet and tweeter have been chosen. The winner has been notified via Twitter Direct Message, and I’m just waiting to hear back on if he/she is alright with me announcing it.

Huge thanks to all of you who entered! Really, I had so much fun watching this take shape today. I literally woke up this morning and said to my wife “I think I’m going to do a twitter contest to give away a poster”… she nodded, and I started this post. I had no idea I would have so much fun. I will absolutely do this again soon.

So, let’s talk about how this all turned out…
The first plan was to have my puppy and 9 month old son choose the winner. I hadn’t worked out exactly how, but I was picturing a pile of entries printed on bacon wrapped gram crackers… the rest is fuzzy.

With very few options in the clearly under-served market of bacon wrapped gram crackers, I was forced to adopt a slightly more boring approach.

There were a total of 51 valid entries. Each entry was given it’s own line in a spreadsheet in chronological order of when the tweet was made. My lovely wife pointed me to the slick and simple random number generator at random.org that gave me a random number between 1 and 51. The tweet that fell on that line number was deemed the winner.

While it didn’t hold quite the magic of a slobber war between the baby and the dog, it got the job done.

So my friends. Thank you again, and stay tuned for I will definitely be holding another contest soon! (but if you don’t want to wait for the next contest, just buy a poster!!!

*********************************

I’ve seen this done all over Twitter & thought it might be fun to try on this otherwise mundane Tuesday.

I’m offering signed and numbered Magic In Type Castle Poster to a random tweeter. To enter, just re-tweet the following…

I just entered to win a Magic in Type letterpress poster! Follow @rustin & tag #magicintype to enter. http://bit.ly/OQkh8

I’ll be choosing a winner randomly today (Aug 11, 2009) at 6:00PM Mountain Time! You need to be following @rustin, and have tweeted the above message before the end of the contest to be eligible.

Now… go tweet!

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Letterpress Posters

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” -Walt Disney

As my wife can attest, this type castle project was always meant to be a letterpress poster. When I first started laying out the piece, about two years ago, I got all excited about how cool it would be to do a big letterpress poster of some Disneyland attractions all set in typography. I was so excited to share when I finally finished the artwork I decided to set it loose as a set of desktop wallpapers, but that was more of a fun little tangent than anything. Letterpress was always the goal.

Life threw a few curve balls to slow me down a bit and it’s taken me a while to finally get the show on the road… but I’m very happy to officially announce the Magic in Type Castle Letterpress Posters are for sale in the new shop!

Since the posters aren’t quite off the press yet, I’m offering a pre-order discount of $25 per poster through August 1, 2009. If pre-ordering’s not your thing, just leave your email address in the box on the shop, and I’ll let you know when the posters are shipping.

And what would a post about a letterpress project be without a little print shop eye candy…

Magic in pieces (of type)


right_spire When I set out to create my type castle, I didn’t realize how much fun it would be to find interesting ways to approximate some of the finer bits of detail on Sleeping Beauty Castle. I’m not going to say I did everything the right way… and each time I open it up I find little bits to tweak before going to press, but things shaped up real nice & I’m quite happy with the result.

I thought it might be fun to use a few close up pictures to illustrate some of the detail. You can click on any of them for a larger view.

The first (Top right of this post) is an unique spire on the castle. One of the interesting points is the pattern the shingles make on the roofline where this spire appears. There is another interesting, but very different shingle pattern on the opposide side of the castle as well.

disney-crest

squirrel

There’s also some fun little details that probably won’t get much attention. This is the Disney crest, that is displayed above the drawbridge, and some cute squirrel gargoyles to the left and right.

Poll – Next Magic in Type project

Help me decide on my next Magic in Type project

Trying to decide which Disneyland attraction should be the subject of my next “Magic in Type project should be. I’ve started on the Matterhorn Bobsleds, Main Streen Train Station and The Haunted Mansion… I love them all so much, I just need a little help deciding on which one to focus on.

Want to offer some help?

Drop a comment, or answer via Twitter

Magic in Type desktops

I love typography. It’s not something I get to talk about often… but I love it. I find little ways to let little type focused projects find their way into my life.

Some time ago while searching for a typeface to use for my wedding invitations, I ran across a wonderfully inspiring project on Veer called Type City. It’s just a great example of what a talented artist can do with interesting shapes. In this case, the shapes happened to be part of a well-designed typeface.

Greatly inspired by what veer did with that awesome fly-through (turn up your speakers, even the soundtrack is perfect), desktops, and letterpress prints, I started a project of my own bringing together two great loves of my creative life. Typography & Disney.

Here is a peek at the result:
type_castle_800x600

I thought it would be fun to turn this piece into a desktop image for those who find this sort of thing interesting.

The castle is set entirely out of characters, ligatures and ornaments from the Affair typeface created by the totally amazing type designer, Alejandro Paul. Every single bit of type was individually placed (and in many cases placed and replaced several times). It took a lot of hours to hammer out how I was going to approximate some of the beautiful architectural detail of the castle. But it really was fun work. A wonderful diversion from my usual faire of markup and style sheets.

I’ve got an awesome letterpress shop ready and waiting to do some large prints for me. Letterpress was the plan from the outset… these desktops are really just a fun little project for tonight. In it’s final form the Sleeping Beauty Castle print will be approx 35″ x 24″ (I had to scour the country for a shop with a press this large). It’s really going to be a stunning piece… I’m very excited to finally get it to press.

This is the first in a series. I’ll be starting with the classic Disneyland attractions and just see where I end up.